


two ways to tell the story

by goodboots



Series: Burst Apart [1]
Category: Sleepy Hollow (TV)
Genre: F/M, Gen, and Ichabod really just misses his wife a lot, but I am the captain of the Abbie and Ichabod broship, creepily prophetic dreams are the new black, pretty much nothing happens and nothing is resolved, spirit hawk is not who you think, written before episode three
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-10-03
Updated: 2013-10-03
Packaged: 2017-12-28 00:55:29
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,570
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/985728
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/goodboots/pseuds/goodboots
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Ichabod isn't the only one who dreams.</p>
            </blockquote>





	two ways to tell the story

**Author's Note:**

> Well no one's going to fix it for us, no one can  
> You say that, "No one's going to listen, and no one understands,"  
> So there's no open doors and there's no way to get through  
> There's no other witnesses, just us two
> 
> \-- The Antlers, "Two"

Abbie is awake the first time she sees the demon. At least, she's pretty sure she's awake. She's been up for twenty-six, twenty-seven hours at this point, and everything's getting a little hazy.

She and Crane are three hours out from having rescued seven-year-old Lillian Lisbon from the actual claws of an actual fucking ghoul, and Abbie is feeling kind of worse for the wear. Her senses have acquired an edge; the fluorescent lights in the police station bathroom have a weird halo. She washes her face in the sink—the water in Sleepy Hollow is hard, too cold from sitting in old pipes, and it wakes her up by increments—she looks up and meets her own eyes in the wide, smudged bathroom mirror, and sees another face right over her shoulder, looking back.

Blank face, white eyes, smiling with too many teeth.

She blinks and it's gone. Immediately tells herself it's nothing; just a photo-negative, an image seared into her eyelids from too many hours staring at terrifying pictures in the archive room. Leftover turmoil from the look on Lillian's face before she realised Abbie wasn't another abducting monster she had to fear. Abbie tries to shake it off. She's been solving pre-apocalyptic crimes for the last year and a half, and besides that she's a cop. She knows how to shake off the weirdness, and she really does mean to walk away, walk back down the dark hallway to where Crane is waiting patiently by her desk where she left him, finishing her report on the whole mysterious-kidnapper scenario so they can go home and crash.

Instead she loses her balance and slides on the tiled floor, slips forward against the countertop, leaning into the mirror. Her vision blurs, goes dark. She can't meet her own eyes. Low blood sugar, the rational part of her brain insists as her stomach empties itself into the sink. She leans there for long moments, resting her head on her forearms and taking deep breathes. Registers the sound of the door swinging open, heels clicking on the floor. She feels a hand on her shoulder.

"Jesus Christ, Mills," a voice says, sounding halfway between exasperated and annoyed. "Get it together."

From somewhere outside her own body, Abbie sources the voice. It's Maggie, the admin secretary, she thinks. Maybe, maybe not. Abbie met a TGIFriday's waiter who moonlighted as a child-snatching mythical creature tonight; maybe she doesn't really know any normal people anymore.

Whoever this is, they're right up in her personal bubble, leaning over hear back and hauling her to her feet, prying her off the counter. She still hasn't opened her eyes. It's so bright out there.

"Come on," probably Maggie says, "let's go find your boyfriend."

"He's not my boyfriend," Abbie protests, leans against her anyway and lets herself be maneuvered out into the hallway. She's not going to throw up in front of the night crew, she's not.

Her insistence is kind of trampled by the way Crane dashes across the deputy bullpen to relieve Maggie of her weight. That, she doesn't need to open her eyes to witness. She can tell it's happening by the sound of his outrage.

"Lieutenant, what's happened? Are you ill? Injured?"

She cracks an eyelid. It _is_ Maggie the secretary holding her up. She's wearing some kind of faux-fifties get-up tonight, poodle skirt and everything. She offloads Abbie onto the surface of her desk.

Crane's up close and personal too, concern etched into his eyebrows.

"Kinda dizzy," she says. It comes out like it costs her something to say. "Low blood sugar or something like that." Then, not really thinking: "There were eyes in the bathroom mirror."

His hands go to her forehead.

"You are warm," Crane says, not letting her just sit still. He swoops in and hooks his arm around her, hiked up under her elbow, urging her up. He's a good, what, foot, foot and a half taller than her, and he stoops a little to support her.

"Eyes," Maggie says, lingering near the desk. "In the mirror. You feeling okay, Mills?"

"She is clearly exhausted," Crane calls back over her shoulder.

"I'm not, I'm being honest. I feel like I'm never honest anymore. I feel like we're becoming Scully and Mulder."

There's no way he gets the reference, but he plays along anyway. "That would be the fever, I imagine. Home it is."

***

He means Abbie's home.

He doesn't live with her anymore. He never did, she insists, whenever Irving or Luke makes a thing out of it; he was staying with her while his visa got worked out, before he could rent his own place. She had a spare room, he was attached to the department, she was being hospitable, for fuck's sake.

"Getting his visa sorted out" is their code for "that time we bribed Father McLean with some ancient magical artifacts in exchange for getting Ichabod a Social Security Number." She's still not clear on how that worked out, but six months after he set up camp in her kitchen and on her sofa, he'd moved out. Weird how often she still seems to find him in exactly those places.

"I'm taking Lieutenant Mills home," Ichabod informs Captain Irving as they pass him on the steps of the police station. He nods, distracted, lets his opportunity to make a joke of their relationship slide right by. It must've been a long day for him, too, and Abbie's grateful. She doesn't have the energy just now for teasing.

Usually, she'll tell anyone who'll listen about how much Ichabod Crane, visiting Oxford professor of history on semi-permanent retainer with the Westchester County Police Department, the guy who some of the neighbourhood kids still refer to as Cosplay Dude, Mr let's-not-talk-about-how-he-showed-up-in-town-pretending-to-be-a-Revolutionary-War-Veteran-and-refused-to-break-character-even-after-he-became-a-murder-suspect, is absolutely not her boyfriend.

He's married, for one thing, even if his wife just lives in mirrors and dreams right now. And Abbie's perfectly happy being single, no, really, Luke, leave it alone. They're amicable, in his words. They're the Witnesses.

Abbie and Ichabod fight monsters together, that's all.

***

Home is her duplex on the corner of Washington and Seventh, across from the riverbank. It's cold inside; they haven't been back in three, maybe four days, and the weather took a bad turn while they were chasing the ghoul up the coast. Crane settles her on the couch and goes to crank up the thermostat.

Abbie flips on the news while she waits. The weather lady says tomorrow is going to be chilly. Big fucking surprise, it's October.

"Tea?" he calls from the kitchen.

"Sure," she says. He knows she can never sleep right away after a night like this.

She moves through the channels, looking for something to zone out to. Stops when she hits static, which is pretty normal to find on television at four in the morning, except that Abbie has satellite and Netflix and something like four hundred channels (also Crane's fault, she never had time to watch TV before he showed up... She still doesn't, actually). Four hundred channels and she's never come across a station broadcasting static before.

"Milk?"

"And sugar," she calls over her shoulder. When she turns back to the screen, the broad outline of a face has appeared in the gray-white signal.

"What the fuck," she exhales, leaning forward.

"Hey," the face on the screen says to Abbie, and reaches a clawed hand out toward her.

She screams, and the world goes dark again.

***  
When she wakes up, she's lying on her bed, and she's not alone.

"What did it look like?" Crane demands. No preamble, no theories, not from her Oxford professor turned Redcoat turned spy. She'll give him this; he's good at rolling with the punches.

"No horns," she says. "Not even a face, really. What time is it?"

There's sunlight creeping in under the blinds. He's pacing down by the end of her bed. He's going to wear a hole in the hardwood if he doesn’t take his boots off soon.

"Very early. Did it speak to you? Have you encountered it before? The ghoul has been thoroughly eviscerated; its powers cannot extend so far."

"It said 'hey.' No, never seen it before tonight. Except—"

He stops. "Except?"

"In the mirror, in the station bathroom. I told you about that."

He's shaking his head. "You said you saw eyes, not a face. I was sure you were only suffering the effects of sleep deprivation."

Well, that's his mistake right there.

"It's—it was like a face, a face that's mostly eyes. And teeth." This is not even the craziest she has ever sounded. "I don't know, I can't really—it's like I've seen it a million times before, I kind of—"

Oh, shit. It felt familiar, and not just in the way things do, in dreams.

Crane is staring at her, has taken a small step away from the bed. Something in her expression is making him frown.

"You what, Lieutenant?" he prompts her.

She swallows. "I recognized it."

***

She goes back to sleep with another cup of tea, with the blinds raised and curtains pulled back, and wakes up just after dark. Her days and nights are pretty much entirely turned around, but her life was like that way before Crane showed up.

She tiptoes out into the living room, finds him sacked out on the couch, wrapped in a blanket. She's pretty sure he's wearing her sweatpants.

Abbie hopes this was a weird fluke, leftover magical energy from the ghoul or something, because between the one Horseman they already know and the other three potentially showing up at any minute, she really doesn’t have time for this.

But the dreams don't stop, not that night or the next. Fall edges into winter, the town gets a light dusting of snow, and Abbie’s dreams only become stranger.

***

"Hey. Crane."

"Yes?"

"You know how you dream about your dead wife?"

His expression goes kind of sour, but she's not taking it back. She's seen the lady's tombstone, that lady is dead, and Abbie calls 'em like she sees 'em.

Besides, if this is the part that pisses him off, he's really not gonna like the rest of what she has to say.

"I am familiar with the phenomena, yes," he says, closing the book on his lap. "What of it?"

"I think I'm dreaming about her too."

He takes a second to digest that.

"You have... you have seen Katrina," he says. He seems to be digesting the idea. "In your dreams. As I encounter her in mine."

Yeah, no. "Well, not exactly the same way. I'm not myself, right? Like, I'm seeing it—"

"—through other eyes, yes, you've said. I was under the impression these were symptoms of delirium."

"How come your dreams get to be visions and mine are a delirium?"

He definitely has an answer to that, but is interrupted by the sound of her phone vibrating on the table. It’s a call from Captain Irving—a homicide in the Ridgeway Park neighbourhood, "Nothing spooky but if you have the time I'd like you so do some regular fucking police work for a change"— and she leaves Crane to his books.

***

When he comes to collect her from the station he is quiet, listens attentively to her description of the crime scene. In the car on the way to drop him off at his apartment, he says,

"You believe you have seen Katrina, do you not?"

"I think so, yeah."

He nods. "All right. Describe her."

Good test. Crane has told her all about his wife, about how beautiful and smart and outgoing she is, even if he used some of his old-timey words instead. (Vivacious, tempestuous, luminescent, etc.). It's kind of annoying actually—like, he's two thousand percent not her boyfriend, but if he were he'd be the worst boyfriend ever, because everything reminds him of Katrina. Anyway, he talks about her all the time, but never really mentions what she looks like. He's a personality guy, her time travelling weirdo. She likes that about him.

"She's a red-head. About yay tall," she raises her hand over head to demonstrate. "Green eyes, accent. Kind of, like, pushy. Like a Disney villain, not sure who's side she's on."

It's a stupid thing to say to him, because of course his spirit guide dead wife is on their side.

"You think her an enemy?" he asks, sounding bored. That's how she knows he's taking this seriously.

She shakes her head. "No, not like that. I don't know, I get the feeling she's dangerous. Like she knows something I don't."

He's not smiling anymore. "Yes," he says, "she has that effect on people."

They drive through the snow in silence a little longer. She makes a left on Main Street, pulls up in front of his building. He lives in a renovated loft downtown, one of the new loft-style complexes springing up; the town of Sleepy Hollow is experiencing a population boom in spite of the insanely high murder rate. Go figure.

She thought he would hate it when they went to the viewing, but he only asked about the rent (pretty decent now that he's signed on a departmental consultant, thank you Captain Irving for your interest in protecting citizens from the Apocalypse) and the water pressure. He's taking to modern architecture surprisingly well, but she still thinks he only picked this place so he could ride an elevator every day.

"Ichabod," she stops him when he reaches for the door handle.

"Yes?"

"In your dreams, is Katrina ever—is she running from something? And when you're with her, are both of you running from something—someone really bad, like, worse than the banshees or the poltergeists or whatever. Worse than the Horseman."

This is the part she didn't want to talk about, the part where there might be something worse out there in the world than the Horseman.

"How could you possibly know that," he asks.

Abbie swallows, because she's been trying for months not to have to tell him this, and says, "I know, because I think I'm the thing doing the chasing."

***

There's no time after that to worry about the dreams, because the beheadings start up again. This is what happens when she and Crane get distracted. The Horseman theoretically has the whole planet to terrorize, but he's fixated on Sleepy Hollow and on the two of them in particular. They stop dealing with his minions and get used to his ugly fucking neck-stump staring them down at street corners and

Abbie basically stops sleeping. She works forty-eight hour days, stays awake until she can't keep her eyes open. She researches REM sleep, prints out articles for Crane to read. There are alarms on her phone to jolt her awake if she's about to hit the deep dreaming level, where shit without fail gets weird.

And if sometimes she sleeps through the alarms, if she makes it to the forest where Crane is usually invested in a deep conversation with his witch lady, if she watches through distant eyes as her form rushes forward and tries to peck out their eyes or claw at their faces, she tries to forget about it as soon as she wakes up.

It's not her, it's the dream demon.

***

She passes out in the archives one night in February. Crane isn't there, in the room or in the forest where she inevitably finds herself.

Her new form is something like a bird. A hawk, she thinks, as it starts to peck the redhead's eyes out.

***

When Abbie wakes up this time, she's lying on the long oak table in the archives. The lights are off, and the sunlight is barely shining in through the dirty windows. It's raining outside.

"How long was I out?"

Crane is sitting at the end of the table, not looking at her. "Too long. Get up; we will convene with Father McLean."

***

The dirty supernatural history of her quaint historical town works like this: once upon a time, there were two covens of witches.

One, the Sisters of the Stupid Sounding Name She Can Never Remember, aligned themselves with the Founding Fathers of America in an effort to stave off the apocalypse. The others, the Evil Nasty Clique of Bitches Determined To Fuck With Her Life, had some portents of the end-times on their side. Long story short, head Good Witch Katrina Crane had to put her husband in a magical coma for a couple centuries so he could wake up and help Abbie fight monsters for a period of seven years, after which point they may all still die anyway.

Abbie was always supposed to be the saner Mills sister; she only questions that when she considers how completely batshit her life has become.

Of these two covens, the good one had one semi-immortal in their ranks. The man who watched over Ichabod's watery grave, who protected the Horseman's buried head. He died the night the Horseman came back to life, right around the time Abbie started unquestioningly trusting Ichabod Crane, but not before he had a chance to prepare his own replacement.

Father McLean isn't immortal, or ageless. He hasn't been guarding the Horseman's severed head for two hundred and thirty-two years. He's kind of chubby, wears jeans under his vestments, and was their primary accomplice in the exorcism they had to perform last Fourth of July. There's basically nothing holy-looking or otherworldly about him.

When he opens the door to the rectory he's holding a grilled cheese sandwich in one hand and a crucifix in the other.

"Not you two again," he sighs. He looks like he wants to close the door. "What's trying to eviscerate the townspeople now?"

Crane likes to do the talking when they're meeting with supernaturally-adjacent allies. She doesn't think it helps much, but in exchange she gets to do the talking with Captain Irving and the rest of the police force, so she lets the deal stand.

"Ms. Mills is experiencing unsettling dreams."

"Aren't we all," he says, waves them inside.

Father McLean gives her a sleeping pill and a sachet of flowers to put under her pillow and sends her to take a nap on his bed. It's a little weird but she's been up for a few days at this point, it's no trouble for her to pass out pretty much immediately.

***

The clearing in the forest is where it always starts; in the normal way of dreams, she can't tell how long she's been there or where she arrived from. The thing that carries her inside itself like a silent passenger is getting smarter. It's learned to wait, learned to listen.

For the first time, Abbie can hear them clearly. They're talking about her.

"She's a monster, Ichabod, you cannot defend her." Katrina Crane is angry, colour high in her cheeks. She's shaking a little, arms clasped across her chest.

Crane looks angry too, but not at her. "She is the other witness—"

"She may be, but care for her more than you should, more than is wise—she will hurt you. Whatever has taken possession of her dreaming self, it does not mean us well."

"Is this one of the tribulations? This monster Abbie visits in sleep, as I encounter you, is it another test for the two of us to overcome?"

Katrina is shaking her head. "I know not. I would tell you if I could. I—" she goes quiet, lets out a frustrated sound.

"What is it, my love?" Crane asks, taking one of her hands in his. “Tell me, I am not afraid.”

She says, quieter, in what she must think is a calmer voice: "Has she replaced me in your affections?"

Oh, she thought he looked angry before, but now—

"Never. No one ever could," he breathes out. "Abbie is my—my companion in this trial, but I will not let her harm you."

The demon takes that as a challenge, moves faster than Abbie can process. She feels things through it with senses dimmed; the feeling of warm blood on talons, of strong, sinewy limbs rending tender flash. The only thing not softened by the distance between her consciousness and the demons are the sounds: she hears everything as it happens, and a sick part of her enjoys it.

Katrina even has a pretty scream.

***

When she comes to, she can hear the priest talking through the door.

"You dream of your wife, your only link between this world and the mirror one between," he's saying.

"Katrina means to protect me," Crane insists. "This being captivating Abbie is not so benevolent."

McLean sighs. "And what do you imagine Miss Mills dreams of? What links her to the end times?"

"She is the other witness, spoken of in Revelations, as I am."

If she hears it enough, she might start wanting to live up to it.

"You believe so," Father McLean says. He sounds tired, too. "And that could be true. But Witnesses are not only bystanders. She might be compelled to choose a side, as you have, in the coming conflicts. She might be swayed to a different one than you have chosen."

***

The four white trees in the clearing.

Jenny, screaming in the darkest part of the night, waking up their foster parents, the neighbour's mangy dog that always stared at them at the bus stop with hungry eyes, and the eyes that looked out from the mirror.

Abbie dreams of being swallowed up by the demon, and in the dreams she doesn't care.

***

Crane stands up when she walks out of the bedroom, into the rectory's Spartan living room.

"Lieutenant," he says, standing up.

"Professor," she says. "Father McLean. Thank you, we've got to be going."

He doesn't try to stop them—why would he? She and Crane bring disaster pretty much everywhere they go. The nap accomplished basically nothing except giving the two of them a chance to gossip about her, but maybe something good can come of it. At least someone else knows what's happening to her, in case she wakes up one day

"I’ll speak with my colleagues," he says, walking with them to the door. "See if there's anything that can be done."

She doesn't ask if he means other priests or other witches. Probably there's still some kind of sorcery situation happening in Sleepy Hollow; she hasn't encountered another serious witch since that one they had to blow up with gunpowder last year.

***

In the car, Abbie says, "Did you sleep at all? While I was out?"

He frowns.

"No, I have not slept since the night before last."

Yeah, she can see that in his face; he looks like shit, actually. They both do.

"You didn't talk to Katrina?"

His eyebrows inching higher and higher up his forehead. "No, not for weeks now. I—you seem to only encounter us when we are together."

He's been avoiding her somehow; dodging her in those creepy, endless mystical woods. He doesn't even sound pissed about that. If she hadn't spent the last year and a half pretty much joined at the hip with him, if she didn't know that his wife is pretty much the only thing he still misses from his previous life, she wouldn't think he was torn up about it at all.

She's got to do something about this.

***

Maggie the secretary brings an envelope full of tea to the station the next morning, slips it to Abbie in the parking lot.

She's not really surprised to find her being used as a go-between, just kind of annoyed. Crane suggested she might be working with supernatural forces when she showed up for her first shift wearing spiked heels and a corset, but Abbie put that down to his fundamental misunderstanding of modern trends and some of the residual misogyny she's been working so hard to stamp out.

The fact that Maggie shows up in a pointed black hat, clearly ripped from some $19.99 Halloween costume, makes her think maybe he was on to something.

"Well, this doesn't look at all like a drug deal," she comments, taking the envelope and folding it into her jacket.

Maggie snorts. "You think you're kidding, but this stuff is banned in five states—not New York, obviously. It'll knock you right out. You and Crane both need to take it around the same time, and don't skimp on the doses, either."

"And no dreams?"

They've tried everything else, sleeping pills and alcohol, audiobooks and Tibetan chanting. She can't sleep without dreaming, can't dream without becoming the monster that seems to want to shred Ichabod and Katrina Crane into flesh ribbons. She's killed both of them while asleep, dozens of times by now. It doesn't seem to harm him in real life, but it's hard to look him in the eye over breakfast; it's hard not to see blood on her hands.

The worst part is the look on Crane's face, after he's seen Katrina, even if their meeting ended with Abbie's bird-form dropping down from the sky and slashing at their faces; blindingly happy and miserable at the same time. It's not right, Abbie thinks, that he has to avoid his ghostly wife for her sake.

He shouldn't have to sacrifice so much just to keep her safe. She's not selfless enough to ask him to stop.

"No dreams," Maggie says. She's left off the Amy Winehouse eyeliner today. It makes her look older, sterner. Abbie misses the other look. "If you need more I can ask the coven."

Wait. Coven?

"I thought you got it from Father McLean?"

Maggie shrugs.

"Who do you think he got it from?"

She turns on her heal, starts walking back to her car. Abbie makes the executive decision, as one of the two witnesses of the apocalypse, not to investigate. She goes back to work instead.

***

Abbie and Crane drink the tea in her living room that night. She's on the sofa, he's sprawled on the floor on an air mattress—she couldn't talk him into doing this in her bedroom, and it's better if they're in the same room for it. That's what she told him Maggie said in the instructions, at least. He didn't question it, just asked for an extra pillow.

She doesn't turn on the television, even though she knows there won't be anyone looking out at her except the balding local news anchor. She and her demon are past jump-scares. That was about announcing its presence, letting her know her mind wasn't her own. She knows. She's dealing. There's nothing else to do.

Seven years of tribulation. She's eighteen months in and this thing literally took away her dreams. What else can it take from her?

"Milk and sugar," Crane says, passing her mug over. Like she cares what's in it; it's weirdly thick, for tea. Dark red, smells kind of like mulch. She downs it in one gulp, curls deeper under the quilter her foster-mother made for her when she moved into her first apartment. It smells like fabric softener. She feels other eyes on her and doesn't look over her shoulder.

"Abbie," he says after a while, soft in the dark.

"Go to sleep, Crane. We're not going to talk about it."

"We are," he says, but doesn't push it.

**Author's Note:**

> I blame Tom Mison and Nicole Beharie's faces for this. Also [tumblr](http://missgoodboots.tumblr.com/). Also you. Yeah, that's right, you.


End file.
